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In Defense of Murdoch

Posted on June 7, 2012 in Slash.Dash

NEW YORK — Fair warning: This column is a defense of Rupert Murdoch. If you add everything up, he’s been good for newspapers over the past several decades, keeping them alive and vigorous and noisy and relevant. Without him, the British newspaper industry might have disappeared entirely.


This defense is prompted in part by seeing everyone piling in on the British hacking scandal, as if such abuses were confined to News International (we shall see) and as if significant swathes of the British establishment had not been complicit. It is also prompted by having spent time with Murdoch 21 years ago when writing a profile for The New York Times Magazine and coming away impressed.

Before I get to why, a few caveats. First, the hacking is of course indefensible as well as illegal. Second, Fox News, the U.S. TV network started by Murdoch, has with its shrill right-wing demagoguery masquerading as news made a significant contribution to the polarization of American politics, the erosion of reasoned debate, the debunking of reason itself, and the ensuing Washington paralysis. Third, I disagree with Murdoch’s views on a range of issues — from climate change to the Middle East — where his influence has been unhelpful.

So why do I still admire the guy? The first reason is his evident loathing for elites, for cozy establishments, for cartels, for what he’s called “strangulated English accents” — in fact for anything standing in the way of gutsy endeavor and churn. His love of no-holds-barred journalism is one reason Britain’s press is one of the most aggressive anywhere. That’s good for free societies.

Murdoch once told me: “When I came to Britain in 1968, I found it was damn hard to get a day’s work out of the people at the top of the social scale. As an Australian, I only had to work 8 or 10 hours a day, 48 weeks of the year, and everything came to you.”

So it was easy enough, from 1969 onward, to rake in the media heirlooms. Along the way he’s often shown fierce loyalty to his people — as now with Rebekah Brooks, the embattled head of News International — and piled money into important newspapers like The Times that would otherwise have vanished.

The second thing I admire is the visionary, risk-taking determination that has placed him ahead of the game as the media business has been transformed through globalization and digitization. It’s been the ability to see around corners that has ushered him from two modest papers inherited from his father in Adelaide to the head of a company with about $33 billion in annual revenues.

Yes, there have been mistakes — MySpace, the social media site just sold for a fraction of its purchase price is one. But I’d take Murdoch’s batting average. He’s gambled big on satellite TV, on global media opportunities in sports, and on the conflation of television, publishing, entertainment, newspapers and the Internet. British Sky Broadcasting and Fox alone represent big businesses created from nothing against significant odds.

A favorite Murdoch saying is: “We don’t deal in market share. We create the market.”

Of course, his success makes plenty of people envious, one reason the Citizen Kane ogre image has attached to him. (He would have endorsed Kane who, when asked in the movie how he found business conditions in Europe, responded: “With great difficulty!”) His success has caused redoubled envy in Britain because there he is ever the outsider from Down Under. (America doesn’t really do outsiders.)

The Times, which I’ve found a good read since moving to London last summer, has impressed me with its continued investment in foreign coverage, its bold move to put up a pay wall for the online edition (yes, people should pay for the work of journalists), and with the way the paper plays it pretty straight under editor James Harding. The Telegraph to the right and Guardian to the left play it less straight.

British Sky Broadcasting is emphatically not Fox. It’s a varied channel with some serious news shows. Overall, the British media scene without Murdoch would be pretty impoverished. His breaking of the unions at Wapping in 1986 was decisive for the vitality of newspapering. He took The Times tabloid when everyone said he was crazy. He was right. He loves a scoop, loves a scrap, and both the Wall Street Journal and The Times show serious journalists can thrive under him.

But Murdoch’s in trouble now. An important deal for all of British Sky Broadcasting hangs on his being able to convince British authorities News Corp management is in fact reputable. He’ll probably have to sacrifice Brooks for that. Politicians who fawned now fulminate. Prime Minister David Cameron is embarrassed. Both Murdoch and his savvy son James Murdoch (of more centrist views than his father) are scrambling.

I’d bet on them to prevail. When I asked Murdoch the secret of TV, he told me “Bury your mistakes.” The guy’s a force of nature and his restless innovations have, on balance and with caveats, been good for the media and a more open world.

By ROGER COHEN

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Google to Korea: Show Yourself on the Web

Posted on February 24, 2012 in Slash.Dash


The Wall Street JournalMatt Cutts, a Google software engineer, lays out the case for South Korean webmasters to open their sites to global search engines. He used examples of South Korean companies that succeeded globally in part by rejecting Korea-only thinking.
It’s hard to believe that anybody with a Web site would not want use a global search engine to attract attention to it. But then, the South Korean government isn’t anybody.

One of the strange hangovers of the let’s-block-competitors-and-do-everything-ourselves mentality that is thankfully declining in South Korea is that when government agencies were building Web sites in the 1990s and early 2000s, they blocked access to global search engines.

Part of the thinking, no doubt, was that this would cause South Koreans to favor local search engines rather than the global players like Google and Yahoo. South Korea-based Naver and Daum do dominate the nation’s Web search market and control its online advertising market.

South Korean companies, driven by the commercial imperative of trying to snag as many eyeballs and users to their Web offerings as possible, long ago made sure their Web sites could be seen, indexed and prioritized by global search engines. And when there’s a big news story in either of the Koreas, we’ve noticed that some South Korean media organizations have become skilled at optimizing their headlines and story placement to draw attention to themselves on the news pages of Google, Yahoo and Bing.

In recent months, Google has stepped up its effort to persuade holdout South Korean Web sites to let its search robot crawl their sites, index their pages and present them to users of the Google search engine.

On Monday night, one of Google’s top engineers, Matt Cutts, gave a presentation to about 80 government officials, attorneys, webmasters and journalists to illustrate the problem. “If a country turns away from the open Web, it risks turning into an island,” Mr. Cutts said.

A South Korean newspaper last month carried a story with a list that showed near half of the government’s web sites blocked access to search engines. Among the quickest to change after that article was the presidential web site, although the Blue House web gurus still haven’t figured out how to maximize their exposure as a search for “President Lee Myung-bak” on Google, Yahoo and Bing still returns his Wikipedia biography first.

Mr. Cutts dismissed concerns that hackers might find their way to Korean Web sites via Google’s search engine. He noted that hackers tend to target Web sites by using IP address numbers rather than domain names.

And when a reporter suggested Korea’s search engines do a better job of protecting privacy than Google, Mr. Cutts replied that Google has developed many tools to help webmasters identify whether private information is appearing on their site.

One of those in the audience was Kang Min-koo, a senior judge in the Seoul High Court. When he saw the court’s Web site was on Mr. Cutts’ list of government sites that couldn’t be indexed by Google – and thus couldn’t be found on a Google search – he sent a text message by phone to the court’s webmaster ordering it to be changed.

Since the change can be made by altering just a few lines of software code, the webmaster had it done in no time. When it came time for questions, Mr. Kang asked Mr. Cutts to check if the High Court’s site showed up on Google – and it did.

“That’s amazing,” Mr. Cutts said, calling it an example of South Korea’s “balli balli,” or hurry-up, culture and promising to use the experience in future speeches.

When an attorney from one of the country’s most prominent firms asked if other countries also blocked Google from listing their Web sites, Mr. Cutts said South Korea was unique among the developed, prominent countries of the world as “one of the few that has done more blocking.”

Of course, the issue is a competitive one for Google. If it can’t deliver prominent Korean web sites in its search engine, Koreans or people who are interested in Korean content are less likely to use Google.

Mr. Cutts appealed to the vanity and pride of those in his audience in his appeal. “If Korea opens up a little bit more, more people will realize how important it is,” he said.

That’s true on so many levels of society and in so many facets of business that it’s just part of the conventional wisdom among foreigners who live and work in South Korea – and just another example of why Korea wasn’t called the Hermit Kingdom for nothing.

Google to Korea: Show Yourself on the Web By Evan Ramstad
via. “The Wall Street Journal”.

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